Cultural Death

“Conversation is a process of coming to an understanding. Thus it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other” - Hans-georg Gadamer 

The phrase “cultural death” can be seen in several ways. To me ,a cultural death isn't necessarily the point at which one culture is taken “over” or exterminated by another culture or group. Cultures aren’t just important in that they are a static set of values and ideals that passively affect us. They are better understood through their function. Cultures are important in that they actively engage us in conversations that help formulate who we are. These conversations are dynamic and shape the time period they are situated in as well as the cultures themselves. In this sense, cultures continue to grow too. I postulate a culture is only truly dead when this dynamic conversation with the culture is stifled or prevented from ever taking place in the first place. 

My focus, hence, is on analyzing the hermeneutical nature of the interactions between Cook and the natives in Obeyesekere’s book and how true conversations between the white colonist and the native’s culture were denied. 

This denial perhaps finds its origins in Cook’s attitudes towards the natives. Despite the formal degree of respect he shows them, at no point does he treat them as an equal. His attitude towards them is condescending. Oboyesekere notes that to Cook “The natives were like children.. They were to be warned and forgiven for the first time, but no second lapse would be tolerated.” His view of them is low to the point where he doesn’t even respect the native chiefs – he doles to them the same punishment the admiralty rules allow him to give to seaman who are his command. Thus, his view of the highest officials of the natives is equal to people he considers subordinate. Worse still, he punishes them past the standard he is allowed to punish his own seamen (“Cook ordered a cross to be cut on both shoulders (arms), penetrating to the bone,. of a man who had suffered already from seventy-two lashes, six times the limit prescribed by the admiralty”). The minimum required for a true conversation between two participants is that they at least open themselves to the other. In Cook’s case, he denied the natives the minimum of respected needed to ever engage with them seriously.  

Oboyeseker also notes a larger epistemic injustice in the way Europeans in general have viewed natives that denies conversation. Natives are here viewed as being irrational, prone to illogical thinking and overly preoccupied with myths and rituals. For the people of enlightenment Europe, this is criminal. They simply couldn't have anything worthy to teach. People who couldn’t be rational simply couldn’t be taken seriously. Hence, conversation here too, was denied. He mentions how Todorov’s Conquest paints the mind of the Aztec native as a “savage mind” and traces how this was a central viewpoint used to analyze the Aztecs henceforth. This tendency is so strong that Oboyeseker’s dedicates a larger amount of the chapter titled “Improvisation, Reason and Savage Thought” to just proving that the natives had a mode of thinking centered around improvisation that he calls “practical rationality”. Perhaps only then could his thesis about European mythmaking could stand as a defense of the "savage" native mind.